Thursday, August 11, 2011

Americans really have no need for metrification, since we use the same system everywhere. Most of us have to travel across an ocean, or at least to another country, before we have use for the metric system in everyday life, outside of specific contexts. And so I never really learned to make small talk about the weather in the metric system, even when I lived in a metric country for a year and a half.

But it's probably not all that hard to convert mentally: 5°C is 9°F. So a Celsius temperature in the low teens corresponds to a Fahrenheit temperature in the 50s, while a Celsius temperature in the high teens corresponds to a Fahrenheit temperature in the 60s.

Celsius

Fahrenheit

0-5°C

32-41°F

5-10°C

41-50°F

10-15°C

50-59°F

15-20°C

59-68°F

20-25°C

68-77°F

25-30°C

77-86°F

30-35°C

86-95°F

35-40°C

95-104°F

40-45°C

104-113°F

45-50°C

113-122°F

More broadly, around here in Kentucky, temperatures in winter are usually in the 00s, spring in the 10s, summer in the 30s, and fall in the 20s. In Louisville it very rarely breaks 40°C, but when I was a kid in Oklahoma it sometimes got over 45°C, I remember seeing a record high of 49°C (120°F).

OTOH, the metric system is very useful in cooking, since a cup is 240 mL, a tablespoon 15 mL, and a teaspoon 5 mL.

EDITIt occurs to me the reason I never learned to estimate the temperature in Celsius, while living in a metric country, was that I spent much time precisely calculating the Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion. A simpler conversion, like "double the Celsius temperature and add 30" would have been better: quicker and easier and nearly as accurate.

In the beginning, President Obama wanted a grand bargain for $4 trillion in debt reduction over 10 years along with some small revenue increases. This deal doesn't have the revenue increases, but the spending cuts are also much less than in the grand bargain. The core of the cuts are something that would have been there regardless of whether or not there were revenue increases; the revenue increases were in there to sweeten the pot for even more spending cuts. The deal convenes a deficit commission that is very likely to pass through some revenue increases, or otherwise trigger automatic spending cuts that are mostly defense spending cuts. And defense spending should be cut at every possible chance: the US spends more on the military now than at any point during the height of the Cold War. See this graph from the Center for American Progress (or this one from the Heritage Foundation). The debt ceiling issue was a stupid, fake problem that only became a real economic issue through political hostage-taking over spending. It could impact the economy in several ways: by forcing a protracted government shutdown or austerity during a time of economic weakness that, by reducing government spending, reduces GDP and provokes a recession; by increassing the cost of financing government debt through a downgrade by the ratings agencies; through a (very unlikely) technical default; or via financial panic caused by any of that. All of these were overblown: only one of the three ratings agencies was ever threatening to downgrade US debt (all such companies have lost credibility following the mortgage crisis debacle, and the market prices of US debt, which are what actually matter, are fine). But the spending cuts in the debt ceiling deal are strongly weighted to 2013 and later, giving only a direct 0.04-0.4% drag to GDP. That's not great, but not apocalyptic absent other problems.

And the really worrying problem continues to be the Eurozone. The deal announced July 22 to finally bring Greece into technical default, seems to have helped Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, but the Eurofail seems to be infecting Spain and Italy as badly as ever. As US manufacturing hit its lowest level in two years, the Eurozone is still collapsing.